The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse. After two years of hype, special counsel Robert Mueller has reported to Attorney General William Barr that there was no “collusion,” as Donald Trump would put it, between Trump or the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians regarding the 2016 election.
There will be no new indictments from Mueller beyond the few already issued, none of which charges a U.S. person with anything related to collusion. This is a big disappointment to the people in politics and the press who were openly hoping to see Trump, and his family, kicked out of the White House and thrown into jail.
And there were a lot of those people, as Grabien editor Tom Elliott noted last week:
►In December 2017, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said the Trump team might be going to jail "for the rest of their lives."
►Last December, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Delaware Sen. Chris Coons — as he often does — whether he thought Trump might be facing jail time. Coons said yes, "the issues outlined against both Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, I think, continue to sharpen the ways in which it is clear that the Mueller investigation has produced a whole series of actions not previously exposed to the public.
►Also in December, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Trump could be the first president "to face the real prospect of jail time."
►In April 2017, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the evidence he had already seen suggested "people will probably go to jail."
Actually, it was always a crock, dreamed up immediately after Hillary Clinton’s election-night defeat by her staff to explain away failure. As reported in the campaign book "Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Clinton refused to take responsibility for her defeat, and the day after her concession, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
Though this was a matter of record — the book was hardly obscure — the news media chose to run with the Russia story, which quickly morphed from “hacking” to the more nebulous “collusion,” quite credulously. They did so because they wanted it to be true, because they hoped it would hurt Trump, whom the press almost universally despises, and because it was good for ratings and clicks.
Press credibility has taken a hit
The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing the work of President Vladimir Putin, sowing division and confusion through the American polity.
As former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tweeted, we wasted two years, at least $30 million and a lot of institutional credibility at the FBI and Department of Justice over “a false story of Russia collusion based on oppo research that was always unsubstantiated and preposterous.”
Liberal journalist Matt Taibbi was even harsher, calling the Russia-collusion story WMD times a million. Taibbi noted that the news media's credibility is a major victim:
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As (New York Times' Peter) Baker notes, a full 50.3 percent of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”
Well, that’s because it was. Leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald administered a Twitter beat-down to some of his colleagues in the news media, saying: “If you constantly went on TV or wrote things to mislead millions into believing Mueller was coming to arrest Trump, Jr., Jared and a whole slew of others for conspiring with the Russians, just admit it. Save yourselves the embarrassment of all this whitewashing & pretending.”
Don’t expect any such apologies.
